Passing along blame is contagious and the problem can be particularly harmful within the workplace, according to a new study. Has your company caught the blame contagion?

Nearly everyone has played the blame game at one point or another, but new research shows that passing along responsibility for a mistake causes others to adopt the same approach, spreading blame like a contagious infection. Merely watching someone blame his or her failure on another person greatly increases the chances that you will do the same thing to protect your reputation at a later point.

According to a study published in the January issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the practice of publicly assigning blame for an error is socially contagious, increasing the likelihood of people making subsequent blame attributions for their own, often unrelated, failures. Furthermore, a policy of transmitting blame leads to detrimental performance in accomplishing tasks, harms health and well-being and can lead to a damaged reputation.

The study had 100 participants read a news item about a mistake made by the governor of California. Half the subjects received an additional statement in which the governor blamed special-interest groups for the failure, while the other half read a statement in which he took full responsibility for the error. The participants then had to write about an unrelated personal failure in their own lives and what might have caused it. Subjects who read about the governor passing blame onto others were twice as likely as the second group to blame someone else for their own mistakes.

The researchers also conducted three additional experiments with similar premises to verify their results. The fourth experiment in the series found that worrying over self-image is a major component of the blame contagion.

“When we see others protecting their egos, we become defensive, too. We then try to protect our own self-image by blaming others for our mistakes, which may feel good in the moment,” study co-author Nathanael Fast, professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California, said in an announcement of the findings.

The problem is especially pronounced within the workplace, as organizations in which passing blame is the norm are less likely to be creative, solve problems cooperatively and generally perform worse in their day-to-day assignments.

“When people blame others for their mistakes, they learn less and perform worse. This problem is magnified when blame becomes embedded in the shared culture of groups and organizations,” the study explains.

“When an individual is always pointing to external reasons for your mistakes, you won’t learn from those mistakes, so it hinders your ability to learn and become more effective,” Fast said in a LiveScience report.

Within a company, blame is often shifted vertically, as failures that occur at the top levels of an organization are passed down to those who have received delegated duties or can be blamed without repercussions.

Economic conditions can exacerbate the contagiousness of blame, particularly when unemployment becomes a major source of concern and puts more employees on the defensive regarding their usefulness to a company.

“Blaming becomes common when people are worried about their safety in an organization,” study co-author Larissa Tiedens, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, said. “There is likely to be more blaming going on when people feel their jobs are threatened.”

However, the consequences of this behavior can have a negative effect on the workplace as a whole, and even filter down into personal life.

“It’s the kick-the-dog effect, where if someone high in the hierarchy makes a mistake and blames the person below them for the mistake and that person blames the person below them and so on, and when there’s no one else to blame that person goes home and kicks the dog,” Fast added.

These harmful results make it crucial for companies to stop the blame contagion by nipping it in the bud.

An exercise designed to boost self-esteem reduced the incidence of passing blame among the test subjects, indicating that a work environment that promotes self-worth, psychological safety and learning is likely to have a lower incidence of spreading blame.

According to the findings, managers who admit their own mistakes without shifting blame stand a better chance of having employees who do the same, meaning that contagious blame is less of a concern when an organization makes efforts to instill a sense of accountability through every level of the workforce.

“People in positions of authority need to own up to their responsibility in making mistakes. The benefit here is two-fold. It will cut down on the blame-contagion effect, and it will encourage others to admit their own culpability,” Newsweek’s NurtureShock blog advises. “Most importantly, we need to change from a culture of blame to one where we can admit mistakes and learn from them.”

Resources

Blame Contagion: The Automatic Transmission of Self-Serving Attributions
by Nathanael J. Fast and Larissa Z. Tiedens
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2010

Workplace Blame is Contagious and Detrimental
by Jeanna Bryer
LiveScience, Jan. 19, 2010

Shifting Blame is Socially Contagious
by Karen Lowe
USC Marshall School of Business, Nov. 29, 2009

New Research: Blaming Others is Contagious
by Ashley Merryman
NurtureShock (Newsweek), Dec. 9, 2009